New insights from the science of science Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know.

Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.

The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789

Although Washington is often overlooked in most accounts of the period, this masterful new history from Pulitzer Prize winner Edward J. Larson brilliantly uncovers Washington's vital role in shaping the Convention - and shows how it was only with Washington’s support and his willingness to serve as President that the states were brought together and ratified the Constitution, thereby saving the country.

The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong

With irresistibly persuasive vigor, David Shenk debunks the long-standing notion of genetic giftedness, and presents dazzling new scientific research showing how greatness is in the reach of every individual. DNA does not make us who we are. Forget everything you think you know about genes, talent, and intelligence, he writes. In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged suggesting a completely new paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance.

The Book of Common Fallacies: Falsehoods, Misconceptions, Flawed Facts, and Half-Truths That Are Ruining Your Life

Everything you thought you knew was wrong! Long before Snopes.com and Wikipedia, The Book of Common Fallacies set out to debunk popular beliefs and set the record straight. By tracking down the facts and citing experts in a multitude of fields, Philip Ward points out the senseless ideas that we have come to accept as fact. Newly updated with today’s common misconceptions, The Book of Common Fallacies exposes the truth behind hundreds of commonly held false beliefs.

Kindle Customer says:"You will never believe how dumb you really are."

Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think

Distinguished authors like Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb have written much about the flaws in the human brain when it comes time to make a decision. Our intuitions and passions frequently fail us, leading to outcomes we don't want. In this audiobook, Eyal Winter, Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wonders: why? If our emotions are so destructive and unreliable, why has evolution left us with them?

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God.

This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

Each year,John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.

Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health

In Death by Food Pyramid, Denise Minger exposes the forces that overrode common sense and solid science to launch a pyramid phenomenon that bled far beyond US borders to taint the eating habits of the entire developed world. Minger explores how generations of flawed pyramids and plates endure as part of the national consciousness, and how the "one size fits all" diet mentality these icons convey pushes us deeper into the throes of obesity and disease.

Skeptics and Believers: Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition

Beginning in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution began to erode the position of authority. As a result, new philosophers began constructing a universal rationality independent of faith. This schism fundamentally changed the course of Western civilization, and it has had consequences that remain with us to this day. This 36-lecture journey will help you understand exactly what the debate has been and will continue to be about.

Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights

Insights—like Darwin's understanding of the way evolution actually works, and Watson and Crick's breakthrough discoveries about the structure of DNA-can change the world. We also need insights into the everyday things that frustrate and confuse us so that we can more effectively solve problems and get things done. Yet we know very little about when, why, or how insights are formed—or what blocks them. In Seeing What Others Don't, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science

In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing

In most domains of life, skill and luck seem hopelessly entangled. Different levels of skill and varying degrees of good and bad luck are the realities that shape our lives - yet few of us are adept at accurately distinguishing between the two. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were able to tease out these two threads, examine them, and use the resulting knowledge to make better decisions. In this provocative audiobook, Michael Mauboussin helps to untangle these intricate strands.

The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water

The water coming out of your tap is four billion years old and might have been slurped by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. We will always have exactly as much water on Earth as we have ever had. Water cannot be destroyed, and it can always be made clean enough for drinking again. In fact, water can be made so clean that it actually becomes toxic. As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this delightful narrative excursion, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, which is both the promise and the peril of our unexplored connections to it.

Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

How does society function when you can't trust everyone? When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal relationships or bank vaults. That's too narrow. Trust is much broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy, everything. In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological Science & Technology’s to explain how society induces trust.

The Reputation Economy: How to Optimize Your Digital Footprint in a World Where Your Reputation Is Your Most Valuable

Your reputation defines how people see you and what they will do for you. It determines whether your bank will lend you money to buy a house or car; whether your landlord will accept you as a tenant; which employers will hire you and how much they will pay you. It can even affect your marriage prospects.

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny

Dr. Peter McGraw, founder of the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, teamed up with journalist Joel Warner on a far-reaching search for the secret behind humor. Their journey spanned the globe, from New York to Japan, from Palestine to the Amazon. Meanwhile, the duo conducted their own humor experiments along the way-to wince-worthy, hilarious, and illuminating results.

Dubito Ergo Sum says:"Real research and a scientific theory of humor!"

What Is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology

Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrdinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: What is life?. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology?

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day

In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.

But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of "miracle" is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive.

Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe

We all make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. Not even some of the greatest geniuses in history, as Mario Livio tells us in this marvelous story of scientific error and breakthrough. Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein were all brilliant scientists. Each made groundbreaking contributions to his field - but each also stumbled badly. These five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on Earth, the evolution of the Earth itself, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. As Mario Livio luminously explains, the scientific process advances through error.

This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

In This Explains Everything, John Brockman, founder and publisher of Edge.org, asked experts in numerous fields and disciplines to come up with their favorite explanations for everyday occurrences. Why do we recognize patterns? Is there such a thing as positive stress? Are we genetically programmed to be in conflict with each other? Those are just some of the 150 questions that the world's best scientific minds answer with elegant simplicity.

George Marshall: A Biography

A major historical biography of George C. Marshall - the general who ran the U.S. campaign during the Second World War, the Secretary of State who oversaw the successful rebuilding of post-war Europe, and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize - and the first to offer a complete picture of his life.

Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success

Starting where resiliency studies leave off, two psychologists explore the science of remarkable accomplishment in the wake of trauma, revealing the surprising principles that allow people to transform their lives and achieve extraordinary things. Over four billion people worldwide will survive a trauma during their lives. Some will experience severe post-traumatic stress. Most will eventually recover and return to life as normal. But sometimes, survivors do more than bounce back. Sometimes they bounce forward.

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History

Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right.

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.

Publisher's Summary

New insights from the science of science....

Facts change all the time. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe and that Pluto was a planet. For decades, we were convinced that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. In short, what we know about the world is constantly changing. But it turns out there’s an order to the state of knowledge, an explanation for how we know what we know.

Samuel Arbesman is an expert in the field of scientometrics - literally the science of science. Knowledge in most fields evolves systematically and predictably, and this evolution unfolds in a fascinating way that can have a powerful impact on our lives. Doctors with a rough idea of when their knowledge is likely to expire can be better equipped to keep up with the latest research. Companies and governments that understand how long new discoveries take to develop can improve decisions about allocating resources. And by tracing how and when language changes, each of us can better bridge generational gaps in slang and dialect. Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable amount of time - a radioactive half-life - so too any given field’s change in knowledge can be measured concretely.

We can know when facts in aggregate are obsolete, the rate at which new facts are created, and even how facts spread.

Arbesman takes us through a wide variety of fields, including those that change quickly, over the course of a few years, or over the span of centuries. He shows that much of what we know consists of “mesofacts” - facts that change at a middle timescale, often over a single human lifetime. Throughout, he offers intriguing examples about the face of knowledge: what English majors can learn from a statistical analysis of The Canterbury Tales, why it’s so hard to measure a mountain, and why so many parents still tell kids to eat their spinach because it’s rich in iron. The Half-life of Facts is a riveting journey into the counterintuitive fabric of knowledge. It can help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.

What the Critics Say

“How many chromosomes do we have? How high is Mount Everest? Is spinach as good for you as Popeye thought - and what scientific blunder led him to think so in the first place? The Half-life of Facts is fun and fascinating, filled with wide-ranging stories and subtle insights about how facts are born, dance their dance, and die. In today’s world, where knowledge often changes faster than we do, Samuel Arbesman’s new audiobook is essential listening.” (Steven Strogatz, professor of mathematics, Cornell University, and author of The Joy of X)

Easy to follow book on the changing nature of facts and how they help make our current foundation for science. He illustrates his points by many great vignettes such as why even today spinach is falsely believed to contain a lot of iron. That story alone makes the book worth a listen.

What did you like best about The Half-life of Facts? What did you like least?

The overall story was ok and some really interesting insights were made. However, the author frequently conflates facts with our understanding of facts. He doesn't distinguish between temporal facts (like the current tallest building) with absolute facts (atomic properties). Also, his claim that facts change is flat out wrong. Facts don't change - that is what makes them 'facts'. Our understanding of what the facts are about something may alter or change as we learn more about things, but the facts are always the same. Even the temporal ones are constant, only requiring an extra dimension to quantify it.

One example of the misused logic the author uses is the magnetic properties of iron. He states that the magnetic properties changed over time as we became more capable of purifying the iron to measure it magnetic properties. This is wrong. The magnetic properties of iron never changed one bit. Our ability to measure the properties changed. The fact remained constant, our understanding of the fact improved.

While it seems that the author may actually understand these nuances, as some of the points he makes are very good and require this basic understanding; that he does not articulate this key difference can leave other readers with the wrong impression of what a fact is. This is what causes confusion when the general public argues against scientific knowledge (e.g. climate change or evolution) trying to claim that science is always wrong and our facts keep changing. By not distinguishing the difference, the author is reinforcing this perception.

I would have liked it to include more incidents and information about how things we take to be facts cease being so. The book was far more about the accretion of new facts and how we can predict that than it was about the retirement of old facts that are no longer considered true. Of the discussion that there was about facts going away, it was more about facts that were not actually proven to be errors...they tended to just become obsolete and irrelevant but still basically true.

If you could sum up The Half-life of Facts in three words, what would they be?

The acquired perspective gained by understanding the fluid change of knowledge, that is the idea that facts have a life, is intimidating at first. By understanding how information changes the knowledge of facts, we can overcome our feelings of inadequacy when we do not think we know enough about a situation.Knowledge changes and more importantly, not everyone is comfortable with that constantly changing landscape. This means that the marketplace is constantly changing because we can never have all the answers.How liberating to know that decisions are made on known facts which are assumed to be true temporally!

I admired the painstakingly presented examples and the perspective of science, medicine and business.I recommend this book highly.

What did you like best about this story?

The connection of the author to his father the scientist is powerfull.

Your report has been received. It will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action.

Can't wait to hear more from this listener?

You can now follow your favorite reviewers on Audible.

When you follow another listener, we'll highlight the books they review, and even email* you a copy of any new reviews they write. You can un-follow a listener at any time to stop receiving their updates.

* If you already opted out of emails from Audible you will still get review emails by the listeners you follow.